Subscription Management Software: What To Look For and Advantages

As a business owner, you likely take advantage of a wide range of services to help improve your bottom line, including software solutions. However, few hold as much potential as quality subscription management software.

When you offer subscription services or products, you have the potential to create robust, recurring, and predictable revenue streams. The longer you keep your customers, the better those revenue streams become.

Taking advantage of quality subscription management software will give you the potential to propel your business to the next level.

Defining Subscription Management Software

Subscription management software is centered around a holistic approach to subscription management. Traditionally, subscription management is fragmented. You need accounting software, payment gateway solutions, and more to ensure everything runs smoothly.

The best software for subscription management consolidates this process, offering a wide range of management tools in a single platform. The best solutions have tools for tracking and managing subscribers, subscription billing, accounting, reporting, and scaling your business. These all-around solutions help you handle every aspect of your subscription business.

What To Look For in Software for Subscription Management

Not all software for subscription management is equal. Each solution is built by a different team, so they all come with unique features, some more robust than others. Moreover, prices vary wildly from one provider to another. As you look into your options, consider:

• Capabilities: No one vendor supports the needs of every subscription merchant.  Platforms offer varying levels of capabilities, but how extensive those capabilities are vary by providers.  It’s important to narrow down your core requirements that need best-in-class service and features vs. those that are nice to have.  
• Pricing: Some subscription management solutions have relatively minimal price tags, while others can be quite expensive. Moreover, these solutions handle payment processing, so pay attention to fees for these services and incremental costs to enable additional capabilities. .
• End-to-End Management Tools: Think of what your business needs from its subscription management solution and make sure the option you choose covers you from end to end.
• Decline Avoidance: The solution you choose should take an active approach to help avoid false declines. For example, Revolv3 uses dynamic routing to reduce your decline and customer churn rate.

5 Advantages of Using a Subscription Management Solution

Subscription billing models can be rewarding, but if you follow the fragmented traditional form of managing them, they can also become quite a headache. There are five key reasons to transition from tradition and move into the new age of subscription management.

Simplify Chain of Payment Vendors 

Subscription companies often use payment gateways for their payment processing needs. These are solutions that make it possible to process credit and debit card payments, electronic checks, and other electronic payments.  These gateway solutions provide integrations to a variety of processors, but also add incremental cost to each transaction while degrading the quality of the payment data, causing additional declined transactions.  

The problem with the traditional payment gateway is that it’s singularly focused. The only thing the tool is used for is charging customers and their value is in the number of integrations they support rather than the quality of their payment integrations.  The producers of these gateways don’t focus on factors like recurring payment regulations, payment data formatting, scalability, or payment success rate.  The best subscription management solutions will have direct platform integrations to the payment processing platforms your business uses.  If the solution requires a gateway we recommend you select another subscription billing vendor.  

Reduce the Headache of maintaining an In-House Payment Team

Scaling and Enterprise companies nearly always have a team of people managing their payment integrations, functionality, and development.  It’s important for every company to own their roadmap and, but maintaining card/token data, deep PCI audits, and the expense of running a payment company in addition to your core business is a thing of the past. 

Migrating from an internal billing stack to a third party subscription billing platform will reduce the PCI scope of your platform and data, free headcount to work on your business roadmap, and add value by performing better collections, faster, with more money recovered.  

Easily Integrates With Your Subscription Business Platform

The core value proposition of subscription billing software is the ability to centralize platforms. It easily integrates with your accounting software, website, and overall business platform. Although you’ll be using a new tool, incorporating it into your business platform will be a breeze.

Determine what part of the payment flow your company wants to own and then how you want to integrate to your provider.  Subscription billing providers can integrate to shopping carts, ecommerce platforms, provide iFrames, hosted payment pages, or hosted fields to power a frictionless payment flow with reduced PCI scope.  Larger merchants and ISVs will likely use the full suite of APIs for a direct integration, giving them full control while realizing the benefits these providers bring to market. 

Saves Overall Costs and Time

When you work with a consolidated subscription management platform, you won’t have to worry about juggling different pricing models for several tools and the headaches of the accounting process. These tools offer more bang for your buck by providing a single pricing model for a platform that does several things. 

• Stream data to the database of your choice
• Write transactional or aggregate data directly to your accounting program
• Provide reconciliation tools to ensure your billing is functioning as designed
• Communicate regulatory or payment network changes that impact your merchant processing

Moreover, because these pieces of software put everything you need in one place, you’ll save time when it comes to managing your business or providing data to your analytics team.

Offers Dynamic Routing To Increase Approved Transactions

False declines cost global subscription companies $443 billion per year. There are several reasons a transaction might decline, but one of the most common is an outdated processor that doesn’t take action to increase approvals and reduce declines.

When a customer’s payment method produces a decline, they’re less likely to renew their services with you, which could lead to high churn rates and profit loss. Solutions like Revolv3 offer dynamic routing, a technology that finds the most efficient way to process a transaction and actively reduce decline rates.

With this technology your merchant processing benefits from a provider focused exclusively on payment approvals.  Instead of charting your own course, leverage AI to route transactions, configure failover attempts, and determine a retry schedule that best suits your business and customer base.  

Allows You To Scale Quickly and Experience Real Business Growth

Quality subscription management software makes it easy for you to track various crucial subscription metrics. That way, when it’s time to scale your subscription model up, you’ll have all the data and analytics you need to do so effectively.

You’ll be able to assess various aspects of your business:

• Pricing Strategy: You likely use multiple pricing strategies for multiple different subscriptions. With the right subscription management software, you’ll easily see which strategies are working best, so you can focus on those as you scale.
• Sales Triggers: Quality software lets you see where your customers sign up for your services in your sales funnel.
• Accounting Inefficiencies: These software solutions also make it easy to keep tabs on what’s going on in accounting. That means you’ll be able to spot and fix accounting inefficiencies quickly.
• Financial Reporting: Fundraising is typically paramount to scaling, but investors need to see financial reports to decide if they will invest. A quality software solution makes it easy to build reports like cash flow statements and balance sheets automatically.

Find a Subscription Management Platform With the Robust Features You Need

If you’re looking for the best subscription management software, look no further than Revolv3. When you sign up for the platform, you get:

• Payment Processing That Actively Avoids Declines: Dynamic routing makes the payment process more efficient, reducing declines and customer churn rates.
• No Fee for Declines: When declines happen, you won’t have to pay a fee for them.
• Accounting Integrations: The Revolv3 platform is easy to integrate into just about any accounting process.
• Financial Reporting and Analytics: Build financial reports and get detailed analytics, all with the click of a button.
• Scalability: Your service scales as you scale.

Learn more about how Revolv3 can help your subscription business today!